Item - Caravan to China

This is an excellent book with lots of interesting details and well-described settings. Some of the themes from this book were revisited in the seventh entry of the Earth Inspectors series. In an e-mail received long after reviewed this book, Mark J. Tilford commented on something I hadn't noticed at the time: there are no loops in this book, so no matter what choices you make, you can't help but reach the ending eventually. In most of the other entries in this series, you could theoretically at least get stuck by making the same choices over and over again.

More reviews by Demian

[Rating: 1/10]
[Recommended? NO]

While the promising potential of the premise in the Time Machine adventure "Caravan to China" is at least partially well-handled, there were particularly few redeeming components to save the quest from its prominent, pitiful weaknesses. It's unfortunate how the dangers are kept at arm's length even though the era's appealing visual-oriented choice-based design system fares well as far as reader immersiveness goes. The writing drifts from uninspired and clunky to very much aware of the narrative's potential, but - as with the majority of the books in the series - I think the adventure would've been more enjoyable had it avoided limiting itself to a single correct path; the inventory selection at the start is a bit arbitrary, I might add, and less seamlessly woven into the story compared to the databank, use of setting and handling of "characters". While the year it take place in may be 1272 AD, you won't find too many pointers suggesting a whole lot of imagination was put into the writing of this quest apart from what had commonly been covered in existing documents/research books or documentaries at the time this was written; though the research isn't exactly dated, per se, retrospectively there are parts scattered about here and there which feel a bit incomplete.

These books, which in all truth are merely self-indulgent and hard-to-find excursions into a different point in time, appear hyper-focused on their short-lived novelty value - a real shame, since the design and the execution of the linear quest itself isn't all that great to begin with. With the exception of collectors of the series or the most ardent of pseudo-history buffs, I'm afraid I can't recommend this title or any of its time-traveling trepidations. ^^

(Mysteriously disappears into the shadows.)

More reviews by Shadeheart